#301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb

Tim, thank you so much, buddy.

Of course. My pleasure.

Well, let's see. To go back, I think it would probably be around second grade. Because second grade, well, you have to understand when I was young, I was really into art and was into drawing. And around the second grade, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out, right? Like big deal. I was totally hooked. Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, everybody. Like I was in it. And so I started drawing them. And I just had such a good time drawing them that I would show them to my classmates. I remember in the second grade. And my classmates started to want to buy them for me. And so I would mount them on this like really special poster board and I'd come into class and like I would be selling these for the total of $1. If you want to get a big one, I would sell you the bigger ones for $2. And so I was having a ball doing what I loved, making drawings, classmates, I'm like making an extra, you know, allowance every week. Like a dollar is a lot of money when you're in second grade.

It's a big deal. And so, at one point, my teacher pulls me aside and she says, 'I need to talk to you.' And she begins to explain to me that students were so interested in these drawings that they were asking their parents for extra lunch money. And their parents are like, 'What do you need extra lunch money for?' And they traced it back to me and the teacher shut me down. Said, 'You can't be doing this.'

Yeah, and signs of spotting an opportunity and doing something about entrepreneurship.

Yeah. It was also, you know, you could say my first brush with regulation.

Right. First brush that may or may not come in handy later.

My parents are from New York. My grandfather's heritage back in Italy and Ireland, grandfather's in Brooklyn, parents grew up in Long Island, moved to Georgia right before they had me. So I grew up in the deep south and I was in, you know, the town of Lawrenceville, which is next to Snellville, which is near Lilburn, which is not far from Norcross, which is kind of close to Atlanta. So if you went, you know, an hour in one direction, you'd be in, you know, farm fields and, you know, horse ranches and it was the south, right, in every kind of way.

That's true.

Well, certainly both my parents including my dad were very entrepreneurial. They both worked for themselves growing up. So I had this environment where I saw my parents forging their own path. Sort of their success was fully dependent on how hard they worked and how ambitious they were in their careers of what they were doing. And my dad certainly was entrepreneurial. You know, he was always coming home with something on the weekend saying, 'I've got this new product idea. I've got this new service I found.' And our basement was full of these different attempts at different things. And so there was this spirit of trying things out by all means in our household.

God. I don't know, some early internet things in the mid '90s as the internet started to come out. You know, I don't remember.

Well, he ended up working with my mom.

And they both were in the health food industry. So when you go into Whole Foods and you see, you know, vitamins and supplements in the vitamin aisle, they were the representative between the manufacturer of those products and getting them to the shelf of those stores. It was interesting was to tag along with them on business trips where they'd drive around the south from South Carolina to Tennessee to Alabama and getting to see how they interacted with these store owners because it wasn't just Whole Foods, it was also the mom and pop vitamin stores as well, right? Independence. The independence. And so, what was really fascinating was watching them interact with the store owners and just seeing how far they would go to serve people. You know, I remember one time specifically, we're in Tennessee, and it was really late at night. All the other store employees had gone home. It's my dad, myself, and the store manager, and we're sitting there stocking shelves.

Yeah. We're doing somebody else's job. But for my dad, it was just about creating a connection with the store owner and really I guess going above and beyond what was required of you. And so I really took away from that those observations of watching how your parents treat people. You know, it was just really nice to see and it definitely planted a seed in me of going out of your way for those that you're serving for your customers.

I don't know.

I don't know.

You got a little taste of it.

What else did you experience in childhood that stuck with you? And I'll lead with one thing that I originally asked you all about and when we initially spent time together also related to Tony Robbins. It's like Tony's the glue that holds us together which I didn't expect to really be verbalizing but it seems at least up to this point that he's been a consistent character in the background or in the foreground. He's a big dude hard to miss. But we began talking about tennis because I had just taken my first ever tennis lessons with Jim Lair and Lorenzo Belram, an incredible coach down in Florida, but you were wearing a Nick Bollettieri Academy shirt and I knew just enough having read the Open autobiography by Andre Agassi to recognize the name. So I asked you about it. So it seems like tennis was certainly something that was also part of the family. So maybe you could talk to that.

We had a tennis family you could say. I think that's what they called that at the time where every member of the family plays tennis. We did coaching together. We played in ALTA and USTA together. We did competitions together and it was truly a family sport growing up. And so tennis was a huge part of my life as a kid amongst a lot of other sports. I think that's one of the things that stood out to me of childhood and things that one of the things I'm really grateful for is that whatever my interests were, my parents would support it. And I think they learned this lesson the hard way.

They got me into violin when I was really young, when I was like about four or five years old.

No, I mean no. And so I was taking violin lessons and there's a recital that I don't remember how old I was, maybe six. And at this recital, it's in Augusta, Georgia. And I'm definitely out of my depths here. Like all the kids are bigger than me. I'm not being able to keep up with everybody else's playing. And apparently I sat down on the front of the stage and just put my violin down. And there's my parents in the back, probably with a terrified look in their face. And after that experience, they switched their perspective and said, 'We're going to support whatever his intrinsic interests are, right?' And so I was really grateful for that. You know, throughout my childhood, sports, music, and art were the three things that anytime I threw my weight behind something, they were right there to support me. Whether it was with sports practice or sports equipment or music lessons or art supplies, whatever the thing was, they were there to support me in it.

It was in the violin lessons. I do remember this part. I was so eager to finish the violin lessons that I could go bang on the piano that was in the same music room. And sure enough, I started taking piano lessons and I've played ever since.

I do. Yeah. I've got a piano at home. And it's like one of those things, you know, it's the first thing I do when I get home at the end of the day is I just go jam on the piano. I either play some of my favorite music from Thelonious Monk or Dave Brubeck or I just make stuff up and kind of riff.

Yeah, it certainly wasn't the end. You know, I just think we remember a whole bunch of things from probably the common stuff, right? Like I started a lawn mowing business in my neighborhood. So I put around flyers on people's doors in my neighborhood and offered lawn mowing and car washing. And so, you know, I'd go mow a lawn for 20 bucks. And that was just quick money in my pocket as a kid. Kind of getting into high school, there was one moment where senior year came around and the senior year t-shirt that they did in my high school, it was pretty uninspiring. Let's just call it that. And I thought, you know, I bet I could do something better than that. At this point, I just got my first Mac, my first Apple computer, and it had Photoshop on it and Illustrator and the graphic software that you needed to make visuals. And so, that was actually one of my introductions to Photoshop was I just redesigned the t-shirt. And I didn't have any money really other than the lawn mowing money that was coming in. And I figured out how to get these t-shirts made. You know, I went to a local printer, figured out how to do all the transfer the files to them, and suddenly I'm sitting on about 300 t-shirts, and I realized I got to go sell these things.

Yeah, like the senior t-shirt.

I got a bunch of inventory and I got to go sell them. Which would come up again later in another story. But yeah, it was fun actually. I remember I did better than break even on those and people were really happy to have a really memorable shirt.

You know, it was a riff on the Tide logo, the Tide detergent. And so instead of saying Tide, it said Seniors, Class of 2000, Brookwood High School. And it did really well.

Yeah. It was fun to learn, you know, how to use some of the graphics programs like Photoshop and then also figure out like how do you turn that into something, right? How does it leave your screen and become something physical. So, it was a great lesson if anything.

Yeah.

So every year from elementary, middle, and high school, the art teacher would tell me, 'You need to take more art classes.' Because it was a talent that I had that stood out and they recognized it and were telling me about it. And so year over year, I would invest more into art classes. And at one point, I was driving downtown to the Atlanta College of Art on weekends to take figure drawing classes. Sometimes on week nights, I'd drive down for painting classes. And then something really incredible happened. I applied for this program called the Governor's Honors Program in high school where they take students from around the state of Georgia across all disciplines, math and science and languages and art. And they pick about 30 students out of the state for each discipline. And then if you get in, you go to a college campus for the summer and you actually study college level coursework in whatever the discipline is. So I went for art and I had an incredible time. I was surrounded by some of the best artists in the state of Georgia and other high school students. And I had teachers who were collegiate level challenging us the same way they would a college student. And I freaking loved it. And there was one woman in particular, her name was Donna. And she was like one of those people in life that you have along your journey who helps you see something else about yourself that maybe you don't quite realize yet. And so she sat me down one day during this program and really kind of laid out what it might look like if I pursued art after high school. And she was one of the first persons that got me really excited about she made it realistic for me to even think about is that even a practical idea, right? And she's like there's one school you have to go to. It's the Rhode Island School of Design. And I'm like the what? Where is that? Right. And so she put RISD on the map for me. And it was during that program during that summer I really dove into painting. I did this painting that was about 8 feet by 4 feet wide. Stretched my own canvas and really threw myself in understanding materials and paint better than ever before. And we had this show at the end of the program. So, you know, everyone in the art discipline got to have a gallery show and there was my painting on the main wall when you walked in. It was really a moment for me to realize that people appreciated the images that I made and my art in seconds. I loved it. I really felt challenged. I felt creative. It was allowing me to fulfill all these desires that I had to create things.

I think probably the environment a little bit more because the medium could have been anything, right? I mean, we did raku pottery and firing, we did figure drawing, painting there. We were exposed to all kinds of different mediums and materials. I think the environment is what I fell in love with.

Being challenged, being surrounded by other creatives and really that's what triggered me to say, 'Ah, this Rhode Island School of Design thing.' So the next summer I did their high school program and got to spend six weeks on campus basically as like a freshman, right? They give you again college level courses and at RISD I fell in love with the campus, fell in love with the people and as a junior in high school I'm like I got to go here. This is where I feel challenged.

Well, so before I leave high school, there's another story about entrepreneurial Joe. I haven't told this story in a while. But so when I got to high school as a freshman, the senior class right before me had pulled off this amazing senior prank. So, at our high school, the mascot is a Bronco horse. So, it's the Brookwood Broncos. And they went down the street to this country western store where you get cowboy boots and cowboy hats. It's called Horsetown East. And on the top of their sign, which was pretty tall. It was a couple stories tall was this giant full-size plastic horse. And somehow the senior class figured out how to get the horse down from the sign. And then they put it on top of our school. And so the last day of class, everyone came in, there's this giant full-size plastic horse on top of Brookwood. And so when I showed up as a freshman, everybody was talking about it. Everyone was like, 'Yeah, did you hear what the senior class did last year before they graduated?' Yeah. And it just started to think to myself, I want to outdo that. I've got four years to think of something. Surely I can come up with something better than the horse on top of the school. So, I set myself a challenge of figuring out a prank by senior year. So, the years go by. It's now senior year. And we have about four months to go and I still haven't thought of anything. And the clock's ticking. It's now three months to go. I still haven't thought of anything. It's now two months to go and I get on to Google and I search, you know, high school senior pranks just to see like what else is out there. Because I'm still committed to figuring something out. And so I keep coming across the same stuff. You've got super glue the locks, the doors, you've got fill up cups with water in the gym and put them all next to each other so they like knock over. And then you've got put three pigs out into the school and label them one, two, four. So everyone thinks there's a third pig running around somewhere. You know, it was like the repetition of how many sites were covering these pranks was like these are not original, right? And that was one of my criteria like this needs to be something original. I'm not going to just copy another prank. And so we're now like 3 weeks until graduation. Don't have any prank. I haven't figured it out yet. And my sister was a cheerleader and so she'd have this cheerleading practice after school and normally I'd have to hang around and take her home. And so I'm outside after school one day and she's nowhere to be found. This is before cell phones. And the way that you track somebody down at that time was they'd make some announcement over the intercom system and they'd call their name. So, I go into the front office and by the way, I went to the high school in Georgia that was one of the largest. We had over 4,000 people in our high school, right? So, it's one of the biggest high schools in the state. And I thought that to access the intercom, it would be some you go in some room, there'd be some big system, it'd be super complicated. So, I'm in the front office and I'm looking at the secretary and I go, 'Hey, I'm just trying to find my sister Kim. Can you page her over the intercom?' And the secretary goes, 'Oh, sure. Just a minute.' She picks up the phone and she hits pound 0 on the dial pad. And then she talks into the phone. 'Hey Kim, Kim, Gebbia, your brother's here. Please come to the front of the building.' And everything she said into the phone came out over the intercom system. And I'm watching this and I'm going, it's that easy to get into the intercom system of the largest high school in the state of Georgia. All you have to do is have access to the phone line and hit pound 0. I'm like, 'Oh my god.' It was this big aha moment as I'm watching this unfold in front of me. And I go, 'All I have to do is get one of those splitter jacks, plug it into the same phone line, and then I can run a cord of another phone to somewhere else in the closet or something, and then I could call in and have access to the whole intercom system.' So, for a week, I'm toiling on this. I'm like, how am I going to route a phone cord without anybody noticing it? And then finally, it dawns on me. Just get a cordless phone. You could be anywhere in the school and have access to the intercom. So, at this point, I recruit one of my buddies, Mark Eisenhower, who looking back probably wasn't the best accomplice for this mission because he played on the basketball team, was about 6'4 with bright blonde hair, right? Not inconspicuous at all. And so we go to the school that weekend and we have this grand plan that we'll maybe trick one of the janitors into letting us into the main office and when he leaves somehow we'll plug in this cordless phone into the school. It definitely was not a well thought out plan at this point, but we didn't have a lot of time and so we just went for it. And so we went to the school. It was on a Sunday afternoon. I think the janitor saw right through us. He did not let us in the office and so we left a bit empty-handed, but we weren't giving up. This was too good. So I employed another friend, her name is Chelsea Hughes. And so the three of us came up with a better plan that we'd go up on a weekend. And there was a community school office that we knew would be open on weekends. And that office connected like these inner chambers to the main office. And if we could just get into that one, the thought was we could go through the sequence of other doors to get into the main office. And so Chelsea went up and tried to figure out where that principal was, that community school director. And so she identified him on the far side of campus. She signaled to Mark. Mark signaled to me and I'm outside in like a black hoodie with my backpack full of the phone, a flashlight, and Mark gave me the signal.

Totally. I go running in through the lobby of the school, right into this community director's office, and then it's pitch black and I'm going through all the doors. It's like chamber by chamber until you get to the main office, the front desk. And I'm there and I move the desk to the side and there's this just giant jumble of cords underneath and I'm trying to figure out which one is the phone line. And then I trace it back to the wall. I pull out the splitter piece. I put it in and then I plug in the cordless phone and the phone from the desk into the same line. And I'm trying to bury the cord base underneath the pile of cords. And at this point, I'm sweating. My heart is racing. I'm like in the darkness of this office. Definitely not supposed to be there. And all of a sudden, there's a tap on my shoulder. Oh god. My heart jumps. I turn around. It's Mark hovering over me. He goes, 'Joey, we got to go. Mr. Chela's on his way.' And I'm like, 'All right, I'm done.' So, we push the desk back. We go out the back entrance into the parking lot. We meet up with Chelsea. I pull the cordless phone out of my bag. I turn it on and we get a dial tone. We have access to the intercom.

All right. So, the next day I decided that I was going to make a tape mix of different songs to play over the intercom system. And I put together a mix of Pink Floyd, We Don't Need No Education, and Alice Cooper, School's Out for Summer. And I even got so detailed about this that I had my mom help out at home. She didn't know she was helping me, but we had two phone lines in the house. One for the business, one for personal use. And I would call one phone line to the other and have the tape player next to it to figure out the right volume on it, the right distance from the phone, and have my mom on the other end telling me if it was loud enough or not. So, she helped me calibrate the right volume for the tape player. So, the phone is embedded. The tape mix is made. It's now the last day of school. And I woke up that morning and I was nervous. I'm like, 'Got to do this today. All right, prank is happening.' So, I go to school a little bit late on purpose. So, as it works, I park my car in the parking lot and in one pocket I've got the phone, the other pocket I've got this tape player, like a handheld Sony Walkman. And I'm walking through the parking lot, it's just me. There's nobody else. And then all of a sudden, our school police officer shows up on his golf cart and he turns the corner and he's coming straight towards me and there's nobody else around. It's just him and me and he's coming at me and I'm staring at him and I'm like, 'Just be cool. Just be cool.' He doesn't know. And like as he's getting closer, my heart's racing faster and I'm like, 'Oh my god, I've got these bulges in my pocket of the phone and the tape player.' And he makes eye contact at me and the golf cart goes by. Like, okay. So, I walk to the front of the school and there's like this overhang area where the bus is pulled up and there's these benches and then the glass doors before you go into the main lobby. And so, everything's cleared out except for this one kid. He must have been like a freshman or a sophomore or something. And he's sitting there and I'm like waiting for him to leave because I didn't want anybody to see what I was about to do. And he's not going anywhere. And I'm thinking to myself, I have to do this now. I can't wait any longer. So, I just run up to him. I get right in his face and I go, 'Look, you can't say anything about what you're about to see.' And he was just totally freaked out. He goes, 'Okay.' And so I go behind one of these brick columns that was holding up the overhang. And around the column, you could see into the glass doors and where the office is, where the phone base is. So, I pull the phone out. I pull out the tape player. My hands are shaking. And I'm just thinking to myself, 'All right, it's go time.' I turn the phone on, get the dial tone, I hit pound 0. My hands are shaking even more. I take this deep breath and actually this beep comes over the whole school to signal there's an announcement. And I can actually hear myself breathing through the intercom. I'm thinking to myself, 'All right, I got to do this right now.' So, I hit play on the tape player. I set the two down next to each other and as I'm doing it, I flick the volume all the way just to be safe because I'm thinking to myself, I don't want to come across as too soft in the volume. So, I'm like, I got to throw the volume all the way up. So, I set the two down next to each other and I walk into the building and that's when all hell broke loose. I open the lobby doors and the music is blasting out of the intercom system. School's out for summer. It's like the speakers are about to explode. It's like so freaking loud. And when you get to school late, you had to go to like a check-in line to sign in. And so I'm in the check-in line. There's like two people in front of me. And this is the scene. I'm in this high school lobby. To my left are all the offices, including the one where the phone is. To my right is the gymnasium. At the gymnasium, two of my buddies come busting out while this music's blasting. They're laughing so hard because they realize that it was me. The coach comes out of the gym, starts yelling at them, 'Hey, you get back in here. We don't know what's going on, but you got to get back in here.' I'm just sitting there with a straight face. I'm not cracking a smile. I sign in. And then to get to my class, I have to walk past all these offices, right? And so while I'm doing that, I hear what's going on. They're yelling at each other. People are sticking their head out of the office. 'Is it coming from in there? No, I don't know where it's coming from.' They got the phone in their hands. You can hear on the intercom them hitting numbers on the phone trying to shut it off. They had no idea where the heck it was coming from. And so as I'm walking past these sequence of offices, I catch a glimpse into the principal's secretary office and then into the principal's office, which is even a deeper layer. And I catch her face and it's bright red and she's yelling at somebody while this music's still playing. Right now we're on to Pink Floyd at this point. We don't need no education. Right. And so this has been going on. This is like three four minutes in at this point. Yeah. I'm walking through my classes in the very back of the campus. I'm walking through the halls. I'm totally by myself while the music's playing. And every time I walk past a classroom, there's a little skinny glass window and you can kind of get a glimpse into it. And as I walk past these classes, I take these double looks and people are like on top of their chairs and on top of their desks and people are dancing. And I get to my classroom right as the tape ends. And look, I thought for sure they're going to shut this off in like 20 seconds, right? So I didn't make a tape very long. It was like a couple minutes. If I had made a 20-minute tape, it probably would have played for 20 minutes, right? So, I get there right as the tape ends. I open the door. People are standing on top of their desk. People are dancing. The teacher's at her desk with her head in her hands like totally lost control of her class. And it's like the record stops. I walk in. Everybody turns and looks at me and goes, 'Joey, was that you?' And I'm like, 'No, I don't know what that was.' And so, finally the teacher gets control of the class again. We sit down and everyone's looking at me like, 'Joe, that was awesome. What was that?' And I'm like, 'I don't know. I don't know.' And so, not 2 minutes later, there's a knock on the door. An administrator walks in. She walks over to the teacher. The class goes dead silent. They whisper something to each other, and then they both turn and look at me. The administrator comes by my desk. She goes, 'Joey, get your stuff. You're coming with me.' And I'm like sinking in my desk. I'm like, 'Oh, no.' She gets outside, she slams the door, we're in the hallway, and she goes, 'You want to tell me what just happened back there?' I go, 'I don't know what you're talking about.' She's like, 'We've got Mark in the office. We know what happened.' And I'm like, 'I don't know what you're talking about.' She goes, 'You can make this hard. You can make this easy on yourself.' At that point, I was like, 'Ah.' So, we walk all the way back to the front of the campus and the whole way she's berating me, chewing my head off of all the damages that I caused and all the issues that were created with the phone system. And we go to the secretary's office and we walk through and I see Mark there. He's got his head in his hands.

Yes. He was a good buddy and a good friend and I appreciate his help in this endeavor. And so he's down like this. He's like totally crushed. And he sees me and he looks at me and he goes, and I couldn't tell what he was saying.

He mouths something to me. And so what he was saying, he goes, 'It was the janitor.' And I'm like, 'But what?' Oh. So, we get through the secretary's office into the principal's office, Connie Corley. I'll never forget her name. They slam the door and I'm standing there with my backpack wearing a green eyes shirt. I'll never forget this. I'm in my brown khaki pants, my green eyes shirt with my backpack. And there's Connie Corley at her desk with her arms like this, kind of huffing and puffing. Her face is bright red. She's got the phone and the tape player and the phone cord and the phone base on her desk and around her are the 20 administrators including the school police officer. It's the biggest school in the state of Georgia. We had our own police officer. And so they're all like this, arms crossed, huffing and puffing, right? And I'm like, 'Oh, fuck.' Like my heart's racing. I'm like, 'What is going on here?' Every one of them took a turn at me just to yell at me about something. Connie Corley starts yelling at me. 'How did you get in the office? You broke and entered.' And she's like really angry. And I'm like, I'm starting to feel a little bit bad about this. Like I'm not sure where this is going to go. Like is this am I going to get off on this or are there some consequences here? I have no idea. And so from that they lead us into this other negotiation room which I've never seen before. It was this long wooden table with these leather chairs around the whole side. Principal Corley is at the head of the table. Mark and I are now sitting across from each other. We've got administrators standing over us with their arms crossed like we're going to make a run for it or something. And she starts negotiating with us. And this is the part that actually pissed me off the most is that she started to threaten our scholarships. Oh. And she looked at Mark, she goes, 'Mark, you know, I know you've got a basketball scholarship to this school in Georgia that you're going to. I'd hate to have to call the coach and tell them about this incident.' She looked at me and she goes, 'Joey, I know you're going to that art school in Rhode Island. I'd hate to have to call their admissions office and tell them about this incident.' And at that point, I was like, 'There's no way you're getting in the way of either of our dreams, right? Because we tapped into the high school intercom system.' Like, right? So, she made an offer. She goes, 'We could press charges for breaking, entering, and tampering with school property and some other things, or you can do this list of things, which included wiping down computer screens in the library during the summertime. Ironically, setting up and taking down the sound equipment for graduation and a few other chores and manual labor, basically.' Yeah. And so Mark and I obviously we say we'll do the chores and manual labor so that we can graduate, right? Just pressing charges somehow equated to

not being able to graduate, get your diploma.

It's a good cop name.

And this is probably where the worst part of the whole story. He did not know the update that we opted in to do the manual labor. He thinks that we're not graduating high school.

So, he calls my mom. He goes, 'Miss G, this is Officer Harelson here at Brookwood High School. Yes, ma'am. I've got your son in custody here. Yeah. That's right, ma'am. It doesn't look like he's graduating this year.'

Oh, no.

He hands me the phone and I heard this tone of voice from my mom I've never heard since, I never want to hear again. She goes, 'You get right home after school. I can't believe you.' Click. I'm like, 'Mom, but wait, we're going to graduate.' So, she thinks her son's not graduating high school. I'm like, 'Thanks, Officer Harelson. That was really kind of you.' And does the same thing to Mark. And we're walking out of his office and this is the best part. He pulls us to the side and he goes, 'Mark, Joey, I've been at the school for over 20 years and you need to know that was the best damn prank I've ever seen.'

So, we go through graduation. One little funny stunt that we did is, you know, you had your honors cords and different club cords that you wear around your neck. Mark and I wore phone cords to honor the senior prank. People were raving about it. And we came back, you know, two weeks later to wipe computer screens in the library. And I'll never forget, we're outside underneath the same overhang like dusting off our rags and all these buses pull up and all these bus drivers start pouring into the school past us. I had like some bus driver, you know, end of year celebration or something. And one of the bus drivers actually walks over to us and she goes, 'Are you the two boys that pulled that prank with the intercom system?' And Mark and I look at each other and we're like, 'Yeah.' She goes, 'You know, you two are legends in this county.' Mark and I were like, 'What?' Like, 'How did they hear about it?' Like all the bus drivers in the county that we lived in. So, it was this just incredible moment of, you know, having an idea, having this ambition to do something that was original. In this case, there was no property damage, nobody got hurt, which is to me the essence of a great prank.

Part one of the story.

It's part two of the story. I'm in college. This is about two years later. And one of my roommates comes home one day and he says, 'Hey, have you heard of that show? It's on MTV. It's called High School Stories, Pranks, and Controversies.' And I go, 'No, no. What's it about?' He's like, 'Yeah, I was just watching. It's like they showed this high school prank.' I sat up in my chair. I go, 'Really, tell me about that.' And he goes, 'Yeah, they filmed these guys who, get this, they superglued the locks in the doors of this high school.' And I'm like, 'You have to be kidding me.'

MTV is making a show about high school pranks and they're doing a super glue in the lock prank. I'm like, 'I have to get in touch with the producer.' So, I get online and I tracked down the producer of the show and I sent him an email that was a teaser of the story, but not the full one and basically said, 'If you want to hear the rest of it, here's my phone number.' Probably about 30 minutes later, my phone rings with a 212 area code.

NYC. And I get on the phone with this producer and he's like, 'I'm really intrigued by your email. Always looking for good stories. What is it? What do you got?' And I told him the abbreviated version what you just heard and he's like, 'Oh, I love this. I'm going to pitch this to my executive producer. We're going to get back to you.' It's about three or four days later, get another phone call from a 212. Hey, this is Leslie from MTV. I'm the executive producer here. Really loved your story. Want to hear more about it from you. So by the end of the call, she's in love with the story and she's like, 'You know what we're going to do? We're going to send a crew down to Georgia. We want you to come back this summer. We're going to reenact the whole thing.' and included in the next season of her TV show. So that summer, we got to go back to Georgia and reenact the whole thing. Now, however, this is only two years later. The same administration and principal was still there.

And they did not have a lot of forgiveness.

The wounds had definitely not healed. They definitely had a grudge.

Right.

Like again, there's no damage or anything that was really done. It's permanent. And so they declined reenacting at the school. So, ironically went to one of my rival high schools and refilmed the whole thing there. And even more ironic is that the principal, the new principal there was a former administrator when I pulled the prank at my other school. So, he was intimately familiar with what had happened. At that point, he could laugh about it. So that summer we reenacted the whole thing. Chelsea and Mark and got a couple of the friends to be extras in the background and it aired later that year on MTV.

Perhaps.

Tim, I think this story starts by telling you a fun fact. I've seen Michael Jordan naked in person.

My job, I had a high school job where I worked as a ball boy in the NBA for the Atlanta Hawks. That was my job in high school.

I love basketball. I played my whole life. And I was reading the news. I used to read the newspaper every morning when I was growing up over breakfast, whatever. I just consume the newspaper. And so, one day I'm in the sports section and there's an article about being bat boys for the Atlanta Braves and being ball boys for the Atlanta Hawks. At the very end of the article, it said, 'If you're interested in becoming one, send a letter about yourself to this address.' And I'm like, 'Oh my god, yes.' Like, that would be so cool, right?

So, I sent a letter, but actually, I sent it on the day of the deadline. Like months had passed and I sent them the day of the deadline and I kind of forgot about it until that next summer I get a phone call and this guy introduced himself as Chris Tucker, the head strength coach of the Atlanta Hawks and he goes, 'Yeah, we got your letter. We really liked it. We wanted you to come down and interview for one of our ball boy positions.' I go, 'This is awesome. I'll be there.' So, I get down to at the time it was the Omni before they had Philips Arena and I'm interviewing with them, you know, telling about my life and my love for basketball and these things. And I get a call back a few days later that I got the job. So, this I'm like a freshman in high school, right?

And I start working, you know, in the locker rooms of Atlanta Hawks. Actually, my very first game, I'll never forget this, was the Hawks versus the Toronto Raptors and they threw me onto the visitors because they're ball boys for the home team and the visiting team.

So, there's different tiers, right? The entry level tier is you're wiping the sweat on the floor when a player falls down in the middle of the game.

Right. You've seen this. Like people go out with the mop and the towel and you're just wiping the sweat so the player doesn't slip on the court.

And I did plenty of that. As you work your way up the tier, then you work on the side of the court and you'd actually run and grab the players' warm-up pants and jacket when they went to check into the game. So, you'd be half like sitting on half court with them and you'd hand them a towel when they came in, you know, sit back down on the bench. And then the next tier was you'd work behind the bench and actually assist the trainer. And so, you'd be handing the Gatorade over their shoulder.

You know, when they sit down, give them the towel, get them their warm-up, their jacket, their hoodie. And then the highest level was doing that for the visiting team, right? And so, and whatever they needed, you set up the locker room before the game. You'd run any errands that need to get done. You'd break the locker room down at the end of the game, the whole thing. So, you get through the game like three hours early to do all this. You end up running errands for the players sometimes, give you like a nice tip. Remember Horace Grant one time gave me a $100 bill.

Take his bag to the bus. Yeah, it was pretty cool. And so they threw me, my very first game, they threw me into the visitors side.

Toronto Raptors. And it was my first experience, right, of like being around some NBA greats. Marcus Camby, I remember, was on the team at the time. This guy I watched play at UMass in college and like really admired. And it was my first exposure to professional sports locker room, too. You know, everybody comes in and they just take the clothes off to get changed and like nobody gives a shit.

But for me it was like, whoa, whoa, where am I?

That was my first experience. Of course, you get used to that. It's no big deal at a certain point. So, I'm in the NBA and I did it for three seasons. I got to work alongside Lenny Wilkins, the head coach, Dikembe Mutombo, Steve Smith, some of these NBA greats. And there were some really incredible moments that happened. One of them was when the Hawks played the Chicago Bulls. Jordan's still playing. This is 1999. One of his last seasons. And, I'll never forget this. So, you have to imagine the scene. We're in Philips Arena and the Hawks are actually winning, which is amazing. And the place is going nuts. You can't even hear yourself think. It's so loud. People are screaming. They're playing music over the loudspeakers. And I'm working the Bulls bench, right? Which is like you've got Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, Dennis Rodman, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, like the whole roster.

And so I'm working the Bulls bench. They're down. Phil Jackson calls a timeout. And the place goes nuts because the Hawks are up. And in front of me, Jordan pops down, Rodman's on the left, Pippen's on the right, Phil Jackson is like right here, and he's furious. Like this guy's using explosives like you'd never believe. He's yelling things. I feel like I can feel his spit like hitting my face. He's just yelling and I'm like right behind Jordan. He's right here. And the place is again so loud. People are screaming at the top of their lungs and I'm doing my job, right? I give the guys a towel and then I'm giving them the Gatorade. So I'm like I'm going to start with Jordan. Obviously he's right in front of me. So I reach around. I reach on this side.

Yeah. Left hand over the shoulder. Jordan is facing this way talking to Pippen who's right next to him. I reached around and Rodman, who's to my left, turns quickly, bumps my elbow. The Gatorade quickly goes upside down and straight into Jordan's lap. There are only a few times in my life I've been as terrified as that moment. Phil Jackson's yelling at me. Michael Jordan spins around. He goes, 'Hey man, watch it.' And I'm like, 'Oh my god.' Like my heart's ready. I'm like, 'Jesus Christ.' So, I did what anybody would do in that moment. If you spill something, you tend to wipe it up.

So, I grab the towel and I'm patting down Jordan's thigh. Like, now I'm like in the huddle.

Rodman's laughing at me because he realized what he had done. Phil Jackson's like right here like spitting. He's yelling so hard. And I'm like, 'I'm sorry, Jordan.' And I'm like trying to like dry his leg up with this Gatorade spill that went right to his lap. And oh man, I'm like sweating profusely, right? Because again, you got like the TV crews are like in the huddle, too. The cameras in your face. It's like it was like a high stress moment as a ball boy. And so, right, you had one job.

Well, obviously, unfortunately, Rodman made that quick spin.

So, like the buzzer goes off and it's like time to get back on the court and I'm still like patting down like Jordan's leg and he's like, 'Oh, come on, man.' He got up and I think right after that he actually had like a whole bunch of points. He threw on a slam dunk or something. I think the moral of the story there is when you spill Gatorade on Jordan, make sure you clean it up.

Yeah. So that your comfortable sphere of action expands.

Absolutely were.

Right.

Yes. So, I decided to go to RISD to study fine arts to be a painter. And I didn't really know what that meant. I had this vision of maybe one day, you know, being able to exhibit in New York or something, like do the gallery scene. I couldn't actually picture it, but really wanted to go study art and painting. So when I got to campus, they have this week of orientation and you get your class schedule and you get to meet upper classmen. So I'm talking to this guy and

Fellow student, upper classman and he's saying, 'Oh, who do you have for your courses?' And freshman year they give you the foundation stuff like drawing, two-dimensional design, three-dimensional design, liberal arts, art history. And so I'm going through the list of teachers and I say this one teacher's name that makes his eyebrows go up. I go, 'And I've got Gareth Jones for 3D.' And he goes, 'You've got Gareth Jones.' I go, 'What is it? Who's this guy?' And he goes, 'Just wait for the chesset project.' And I go, 'What's the chesset project?' And he goes, 'You'll see.' So my very first class is with this guy Gareth Jones teaching three-dimensional design. And picture this. We're in this art studio with these concrete floors, these like rickety metal stools, plaster covered kind of work surfaces. It's a little bit cold. It's September in New England. And you know, it's our very first class and I'm sitting around with, you know, 18 other freshmen. We're all trying to make sense of where we are in the world and what this RISD thing is all about. And this is about to be our first impression of what is it like to be a student at RISD. And so we're sitting there and all of a sudden this guy wearing all black with this big poofy head of hair comes out and he stands in front of us and he's got this Welsh accent and he goes, 'I just want you all to know that half of you are going to fail my course because you won't finish the chesset project.' And I'm thinking to myself, 'Oh my god, that's what it's going to be like here.' Like half the people, I look to my left, they look to my right, one of them's going to be gone because they're going to fail out. I'm like, 'Oh my god.' And we're all looking at each other like, 'Is he serious?' And he goes on to explain the chesset project. So, in addition to your weekly assignments, the chesset project is this semester-long project that takes place outside of the classroom on your own time where you have to choose a three-dimensional artist like a sculptor like Henry Moore, an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright, a furniture designer, a fashion designer, and you had to find a book about them. And from that, you had to select pieces of their work to recreate. And you did it in the format of a chess set, which means it didn't have to look like actual chess set pieces, but you take one of their creations and replicate it eight times for your pawn. And it had to look exactly like the picture in the book. You took another one of their creations and you had to replicate it twice for the rooks.

In 3D. And you had to do it at 12-inch scale.

And just looking at a picture, you had to figure out what it's made of. What's the backside look like? What's the underside look like? And at this time I had a growing interest in furniture design. And I came across this furniture designer from the 1920s and 30s named Gerrit Rietveld. He was a Dutch architect and designer. And he did these really beautiful chairs that are actually in the Museum of Modern Art. They're classics. And I thought a couple of things. One is as I got to know Gareth Jones, the professor, it became very clear that this guy was super opinionated. He would argue to the death to make sure that he was always right. I would watch him like just argue with students like relentlessly to make his point. And out of that, I just had this growing thinking of like, wow, like I'd love to prove this guy wrong at some point. And so, I also thought, I'm going to throw myself into this project. There's no way I'm failing. In fact, I want to complete this project. And if I'm going to commit so much of my time to this, and I'm going to make chairs from this designer, Gerrit Rietveld, at the end of it, I want to come out with something I can use. I don't want 12-inch chairs. I actually want full-size functional chairs. And so, I'm like, this is a really great idea. I'm going to share this with Gareth. So, I call him over and I'm like, Gareth, I want to make full-size functional chairs. And my expectation at this time was that he's going to, you know, give me a high five and say, 'Joe, you can do it. You got this. I believe in you.' Instead, Tim, he goes, 'Joe, I really don't think you can do it. Really focus on the smallest scale.' And he walks away. And I'm like, 'No fucking way.'

Now you really have to do it.

The thing is, I didn't know how the hell to make a chair. I never worked with wood before. I never worked with power tools, like actual machine shop tools. And I was really stepping into the unknown on this. And I had a semester to figure it out. So, I just committed all of my time to making this project happen. On weekends, Saturday nights, my friends would be going out to, you know, parties on campus and I was in the studio trying to figure out how to make chairs. And so, I started by going to the furniture department and talking to upper classmen. And I actually sat down with the head of the furniture department. Her name is Rosanne Somerson. And I told her about my ambitions. And she looked at me with kind of a crazy face. It's like, you're never going to figure this out. But she was encouraging and she pointed me to some upper classmen who then started to help me understand wood and machines and the tools, table saws and bandsaws and lathes and the things you need to make furniture. And so piece by piece I started to figure out how to make these chairs. I was sourcing wood. I had access to the shop that they were giving me. And the thing is I never told Gareth where I was in the project. So every check-in he'd be like, 'How's it coming?' I'm like, 'It's all right.' And I would downplay my progress.

Meanwhile, in my dorm room is starting to fill up with these chairs everywhere, right? And so I worked my butt off and that whole semester I was like hacking my way through it and I get to the pawn. So I have to pick one of his chairs and make it eight times. He made this beautiful bench out of just four pieces of wood. And I'm thinking to myself, 'Wow, these benches are really big. That's a lot of wood. I can't afford this. I don't know. I'm just a freshman in college.'

Oh, yeah.

So study job at the time. I was trying to like fund this however I could. And so I'm in the quad one day outside the freshman dorms and I make an observation. Everyone's standing around smoking here in the quad and there's actually nowhere to sit. I've got this bench design that I'm going to make. What if I approach the school, get them to pay for the wood, I'll make the benches for my project, then they can have them afterwards to put in the quad for people to sit on. So, I go to the head of residence life. I pitch him the idea. He loves it. They fund a few thousand worth of this inch thick plywood. And in doing so, I get access to the school's wood shops and the school's craftsmen like who work on campus. And so now I've got their help to help fabricate these benches.

And they paid for all the wood, which I definitely could never have afforded. And so, by the end of the semester, I've amassed 16 full-size functional chairs. And Gareth had no clue. And I actually finished the last chair at about two in the morning, the night before the final crit, the day before the final crit.

Crit is critique, right?

Yeah, a critique. In art school, you have these critiques where you put your work out and then the professor and the class critique you and that's how you learn how to improve as an artist or designer. And so it's like now December, it's freezing cold outside. It's Providence. And I specifically chose the slot right after lunch to present because I figured when everyone's out getting lunch, I'll get my roommates and a couple buddies to help me carry all these chairs and assemble them in the space. When people come back, there'll be this great reveal moment because nobody has any clue except a couple friends exactly what I've pulled off here. And Tim, my only regret from this project is that I did not have a camera in my hand to take a picture of Gareth's face when he entered the studio. I swear I'm standing there and he comes marching in and he picks his head up and he looks at the room suddenly and you can see him counting in his head 15, 16 and he looks at me and he goes, 'Joe, you've done it. You've proved me wrong.' And I'm like, 'Yes.' And for the rest of the critique, we all sat in my chairs and we talked about the project. And I got very high marks obviously and it was one of those breakthrough moments where you have somebody that you look up to tell you you can't do something and you are literally tasked with something you've never done before and somehow you persevere through it. You ask for help. You figure it out and on the other side of that I was sitting there in this chair thinking, 'Wow, like if I can figure this out, what else could I figure out?'

Like this seemed like an impossible feat before this whole thing started. And here I am. I'm sitting in these chairs, the professor's like beaming at me and it was just like one of these moments that one has in life where you sort of cross a threshold of understanding your limits and at that point I had a new bar or a new set of limits.

I mean, well, first of all, I was so tired. I had been up for actually I hadn't slept for about 3 days before that. So, over 48 hours. I was without sleep. So, I was delirious. B, I was just so relieved. And then third, I was like, there's this excitement inside of me of like I just proved myself wrong. What else can I prove myself wrong on? And suddenly it's like there was so much possibility of anything at this point forward that I come across that feels impossible. I probably need to take a second look at that and rethink that based on this experience because again like how do you make a chair and then how do you make 16 full-size functional chairs at the end of the project over a course of a semester. And so what's cool is that the benches got installed, students were sitting in them for they lasted for a couple years after that. And so the legacy of it not only went into the benches, but the story of what had happened became his story that he told every class after that.

I don't know if there's just one source. I think sports is definitely a way to if I had to point to something, you played so many sports growing up from tennis to baseball to basketball to track and field to cross country. Like some of those are team sports, some of those are individual sports. And in all of those, I mean, in any sport that's competitive, you're trying to ultimately compete with yourself to do a better performance than you did the last time, right? And so I looked at sports as this constant I was in a game with myself and like cross country was a great example. That sport for me was I feel like where I honed my goal setting and was able to practice pushing my limits. So every race I would if I crossed the finish line and I could still really like walk and had energy to me that was energy I could use on the course to run a faster race.

And so eventually I got to this point where I literally would collapse after the finish line. And it became so well known that like the medics would be waiting for me and they'd have the ice bags and like they'd have like the IV just in case and like the parents would be there to like pick me up. And in the last, you know, 800 meters to the finish line, I'd always try to find somebody who was running a little bit faster than me. And I just would try to accelerate to catch up with them, draft them a little bit. And then sometimes I'd be neck and neck with them, like and the finish line's within sight. It's so close. And I would just say out loud to them, I'd say, 'You're not beating me. You're not beating me.' And I'd use that to motivate myself just to try to run faster to get a better time.

Yes.

100%.

Exactly.

And you feel like you've expanded, you've pushed the limits of what you thought was possible within yourself.

Yeah.

But design is super tangible, right? I mean, you're building these chairs and these benches.

Sure. And it's so funny because that was a piece of advice I got in seventh grade when I started playing basketball. The basketball coach said, 'Joe, Joey, if you want to get better at basketball, you need to play with people who are better than you.'